Posts tagged: sports photography

For acclaimed director Michael Apted, the eyes of photographers and filmmakers are inextricably—if invisibly—bound to hands of the craftsmen and women who design and build their lenses. For Bending the Light, the director joined forces with five of the world’s best photographers and cinematographers as well as several engineers working at the Canon Inc. factory in Utsunomiya, Japan to trace the journey of the lens from its conception, across space and time to the final images it produces.

Gothenburg, Sweden-based photographer Karl Lundholm and his girlfriend often fantasized about living overseas in Australia, holding on to what he now calls their “little dream” until they actually made the trip. When he finally arrived on the shores of the Queensland suburb of Coolangatta, the water rose before him, lapping, sparkling and warm, and he dove right in.

When Brooklyn-based dancer Shoccara Marcus learned of her father’s cancer diagnosis, she immediately packed up her life and returned home to Atlanta after more than ten years away. Her unexpected arrival brought with it an array of ambiguities; now an adult, she found herself propelled backwards into the role she had occupied as a child. Choreographing My Past emerged organically as Marcus revisited her childhood surroundings. In each frame, she performs a new step, constructing an ongoing dance by which she navigates the invisible but inevitable tensions that run beneath any homecoming.

When Australian Oliver Percovich first set his skateboard down on the streets of Kabul, he was almost instantly surrounded by a throng of curious children, all wanting to learn how how to speed, flip, and maneuver the board just as he did. Since that fateful day in 2007, Percovich has established Skateistan, a non-profit devoted to inspiring, educating, and empowering children through the sport of skateboarding. When London-based photographer Jessica Fulford-Dobson heard of the program, she set her sights on the girls who make up an estimated 45% of the Skateistan student population.

Basel, Switzerland-based photographer Lauryn Ishak has seen her fair share of mountains, but nothing could have quite prepared her for her visit to The Dolomites, a set of peaks nestled within the northern Italian Alps.

For Brothers, Cincinnati-based photographer Taylor Dorrell chronicles the lives of his teenage brother and his tightly-knit group of friends in the months preceding their high school graduation and looming departure from home in Columbus, Ohio. In them, he finds a band of brothers, bound not by blood but by the invisible fastenings of boyhood, tracing a steady shift from youth into adulthood, from dependency into autonomy.

Nearly 40 years ago this month, athletes on the Yale University Women’s Crew team staged a now-historic protest in support of Title IX, an amendment that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education, including collegiate sports. Although we have come a long way since then, varsity sports— especially contact sports— are normally associated with maleness, despite the talented women playing on fields across the world. For The Bears, Providence-based photographer Alejandra Carles-Tolra chronicles the rise of a new group female athletes who are making waves in the Ivy League sports world: Brown University’s Women’s Rugby team.

A few years ago, if you mentioned pole dancing to Netherlands-based photographer Bart Erkamp, he, like many other people, would associate it with scantily-clad women and the ogling men that frequent strip clubs. In the summer of last year, that all changed. After dating a woman involved in the sport, he learned about pole fitness, a serious athletic pursuit that had evolved well past its erotic origins.

In 1903, a maverick physical fitness advocate by the name of Bernarr Macfadden founded the Coney Island Polar Bear Club. Professing that our bodies are “our most glorious possessions,” he gathered a group of swimmers to brave the icy Atlantic Ocean in his belief that a dip in the wintry waves was the key to boosting stamina, virility and immunity.

While critics at the time thought Macfadden was a charlatan, more than a century later, a group of 100 enthusiastic swimmers still take to the shore every Sunday during the Northeast’s coldest months to plunge themselves into the bitter breakers. The frigid fanfare reaches its peak annually on January 1 when revelers ring in the new year with a massive public swim.

As the photography gods would have it, NYC-based French-Venezuelan photographer Mathieu Asselin was at Coney Island one cold Sunday in January to experiment with lighting when he was presented with the opportunity to shoot the swimmers.